The Path to Hot Towers

In collaboration with Herbert Riehl, Joanne developed her signature “hot tower” hypothesis of convection, demonstrating that clouds are the spark plugs of Earth’s general circulation.

Chicago

At age 17, Joanne attended the University of Chicago and enrolled in a number of introductory courses, including astrophysics and psychology. In 1942, at the end of her sophomore year, she met Carl-Gustav Rossby and joined the war effort, working to train aviation cadets for weather forecasting. She pursued advanced training in meteorology, but the all-male Chicago faculty opposed her at every step. Her interest in the tropics was piqued by a class she took with Herbert Riel, and the two began a long-term and fruitful collaboration. Her marriage to meteorologist Victor Starr was short-lived. As a single mother, she earned her PhD while working at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dark Clouds at Dawn

Joanne Gerould was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she benefitted from educational opportunities but suffered emotional neglect, especially from her mother.

UCLA

Joanne’s rapid rise in the profession led to an offer of a full professorship of meteorology at UCLA in 1960, but emotional turmoil left her life in shambles and resulted in her leaving the university after only three years.

Introduction

Joanne Simpson transformed the science of the tropical atmosphere and set a course in science for professional women to follow. She had a lifelong passion for clouds and severe storms, flying into and above them, measuring and modeling them, theorizing about the role of tropical clouds in the planetary circulation, and mentoring a generation of tropical meteorologists. In 1993, just shy of her seventieth birthday, Joanne commandeered a fully equipped NASA-owned DC8 research airplane during a field project to study El Niño, and flew several flights directly into tropical cyclone Oliver in the Coral Sea, some 500 km off the coast of Townsville, Australia. She and the crew did this on several consecutive days. The aircraft was equipped with radar being tested for use on a new satellite to measure tropical rainfall, and they wanted to use it to collect the best possible data on storm structure and dynamics. The third flight, directly into the storm, pushed the plane to its limits. The excessive humidity and turbulent shaking shorted out the experimental electronics and rendered the plane unusable for future missions. NASA was not pleased. Buffeted but invigorated by the successful but totally unauthorized flights, Joanne told the press that she felt fortunate to have seen meteorology develop from the “horse-and-buggy era” to the space age....

Breaking Through

This concluding chapter features the testimonies of Joanne’s colleagues while it reprises and re-evaluates her accomplishments.

NASA

Joanne finally found contentment and professional fulfillment at NASA, where she supervised the development and launch of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite and served as a mentor to many colleagues.

University of Virginia

Joanne accepted a named chair at the University of Virginia, but the position was not right for her or her husband.

NOAA

Joanne settled down with her third husband, hurricane expert Robert Simpson, and accepted a position directing the experimental meteorology laboratory in the National Weather Service. She spent ten years in NOAA, but chafed at the bureaucracy.

Woods Hole

With her PhD in hand and her second husband and two children in tow, Joanne moved to the Woods Hole Oceanograpic Institution where she was able to fly in clouds in the tropics. She worked there on field programs for ten years and developed the first computer model of clouds. In collaboration with Herbert Riehl, she developed her signature “hot tower” hypothesis of convection.